Back in 1992, the idea you could make a business from Linux seemed little more than a pipedream. Three German students, Hubert Mantel, Roland Dyroff, and Burchard Steinbild, and software engineer Thomas Fehr, thought they could make a go of it, and formed S.u.S.E, "Software und System-Entwicklung" -- in English, "Software and systems development."
Today, under the name SUSE, it's one of the three most successful business Linux distributions in the world.